@gardenlady “I think she could still be an engineer if she went to Williams, but her college years will be longer as she would need more courses in grad school. She needs to know what she is getting in to.”
^ This exactly!
If she went to Cornell, Lehigh or Harvard, she could be working as an engineer in 4 years, and then make a decision later about whether she would like to go to grad school. Penn SEAS or Columbia SEAS could be good options too for a student like this.
In my opinion, in most cases, it is a lot to ask a 17 or 18 year old to make a plan for graduate school from the beginning, especially if they know they want to be an engineer.
Somebody with a math or science degree can go directly on to graduate study in some sub-areas of engineering.
(Provided of course that they are accepted to same. Which is not guaranteed. And sometimes with remedial work required, which may take extra time)
But they will not have had the breadth of exposure to the field overall.
If they had started in an engineering school, with full breadth/overview of the whole field, they may well have chosen a different field/subfield of engineering. Having been exposed to same.
The best path for somebody who wants to be an engineer is to go to a “real” engineering school.
The school should have all of the major areas represented: civil, electrical, mechanical, chemical. Because after the general exposure courses you’ll take sophomore year, you may find that a totally different field, that you didn’t even know about when you applied to college, is what most interests you.
You can go to a school with a “general” engineering degree, and become some sort of engineer from that, but not necessarily the same sort as you might have selected had you had exposure to the whole breadth of engineering areas and activities.
You can do a combined program but that takes extra time and money, you will have to switch campuses, and you will have virtually no meaningful guidance related to engineering at the liberal arts college.
So you can certainly do those other paths and in the end become an “engineer” [of some sort or other]. They may have advantages in some other respects that you may value. But they are less optimal with respect to carving a path, and training, in engineering, or in money expended towards that goal, as the case may be.
IMO.
BTW, CC has an “engineering” subforum that may be useful to OP.
^Um, a “general” engineering degree (I had one, from Swarthmore) exposes you to at least as much of the breadth of engineering as if you enter a traditional program, where you typically track into one division right from the start.
Swarthmore does not offer so much as a single course in the sub-area of engineering I eventually wound up in.
I agree that programs that require immediate specialization are not optimal either. Pending investigation re: ease of changing. At the school I attended, the “track” didn’t start till junior year. It has to start sometime, lest the student won;t be able to take all the advanced level courses in his/her selected sub-area.
Interested parties can simply go on to registrar’s list of courses actually given in a particular area and sub-area. and count them. At each school of interest. Not in the course catalog, but on the registrar’s pages showing the courses actually offered. Also note how many of these are only given every other year…
^I can certainly believe that, but I thought we were talking about schools comparable to Williams. I imagine that program/school was an order of magnitude larger. This student presumably likes the small/liberal arts focus of Williams.
@donnaleighg Swarthmore is definitely an LAC, and I believe that Swarthmore is smaller than Williams in enrollment. I would see it as a peer in every way, along with Amherst. Swarthmore is unusual in offering a general engineering major. I haven’t seen that in many places, but it may offer a middle ground.
I would typically be cautious about a general engineering major, but with the Swarthmore brand, I think it would be fine. People who hire have a lot of respect for it. I would not do it with a random directional though, or you might end up unemployed. I would also consider adding something like a minor in CS or maybe statistics onto a general engineering major to improve your options. CS touches everything these days.
Life is full of compromises. Or it can be.
The student can compromise on aspects of exposure to the field of engineering, from a breadth perspective. Or likelihood of entering engineering at all.
The student can compromise on school size.
.
There are various smaller engineering programs that the student might investigate. Though most are still larger than most LACs. Some are associated with liberal arts colleges. Some nevertheless offer a comprehensive program. I think.
These other choices might also involve compromises.
The CC engineering subforum might help.
Using percentages of grads going on is misleading. Absolute numbers may be much larger at large schools and give students a larger peer group of equally smart, likeminded (STEM) students. I have zero shame in not being up on east coast schools that serve merely hundreds in any one HS grad class year. Different expectations for different people and different regions.
The student needs to clarify if a school or engineering is her top priority.
I note from post #`1 that Lehigh is already on the radar.
IMO, the OP’s daughter might want to screen some of these, to see if they meet her needs. I haven’t had occasion to look into engineering schools in many years, so it’s not like I know these will work. Just some “usual suspects” on the smaller side (IIRC) :
RPI
Case Western
Cooper Union (but no campus…)
There’s Olin, I guess, but it’s teeny from what I read.
U Rochester, Tufts, Rice
Bucknell, Trinity (CT), Union (NY), Lafayette (PA)
Maybe Johns Hopkins??
A family friend is at WUSTL doing a double masters in two fields of engineering after his 4 years at a LAC as a physics major. He is loving it. He wanted engineering out of HS but didn’t get into his first choice and then got such a great scholarship to the LAC that he couldn’t say no. He originally thought he might do the 3/2 plan but decided this works better for him.